UNCG’s Chapter of AAUP

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UP is here to serve the interests of all faculty at UNCG, whether Professional Track or tenure track, and budding faculty (graduate students). AAUP is the ONLY organization that advocates for us all; it is committed to academic freedom, shared governance, and due process. Here is our mission statement.

Our chapter becomes stronger, and has a more powerful voice, the more of us are joined together. We encourage you to become a member, with costs as low as $10 per year for graduate students and retired faculty and only $20 a year for tenure-track and tenured faculty. Even if you aren’t sure yet whether you want to join, you can send us a short message to UNCG.AAUP@gmail.com and we’ll add you to our list of people who get updates on our activities and plans. Most people prefer to use a private email address rather than their uncg.edu address, but in any case we always use the “bcc” feature when sending out email to the group to ensure anonymity.

News and Updates

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Early Summer Updates

We have secured the cooperation of our administration to allow for our own outside auditor, University budget expert Howard Bunsis, to provide an objective, outside analysis of UNCG’s budget situation. Bunsis has done similar work at Rutgers University and many other campuses faced with “austerity” policies and has proven very successful in providing information that faculty can use to challenge administrators’ claims of fiscal necessity.   We  have hired Professor Bunsis to complete this work by the fall semester. Our AAUP chapter has paid for Bunsis through a combination of member dues and a special fundraiser to which many of you have contributed (which has now totaled over $3000). THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU for your financial contributions!  

Please Join our AAUP Chapter

If you are not a dues-paying member already, we urge you to consider joining AAUP-UNCG. All professional track, tenure-line faculty and graduate students are eligible to join. Joining the campus chapter is a bargain. We urge you all to check out what we are doing on this website and consider donating and/or becoming dues-paying members ($20 a year for tenure-line full-time faculty, $15 for Professional Track full-time faculty, and $10 for graduate students and retired faculty).  If you are interested in also joining the national AAUP organization, which would give members voting rights on issues of state or national matters, that is a separate membership fee. You do not have to be a member of the national organization to belong to the local chapter.

We are accepting dues now for the 2023-24 academic year.  If you paid dues in the past month or so, those will count toward next year. If not, please JOIN NOW.

One thing local chapter membership will get you is a regular update email from us sharing the latest developments related to UNCG faculty and zoom links to our monthly meetings. One of the ways that faculty voices get diluted is when new initiatives are rolled out very quickly, without much time for people to respond (or, even sometimes, realize what’s going on). The AAUP’s emails (sent via personal rather than campus email accounts) and meetings have proven vital in helping us share information across schools and disciplines and formulate effective responses. Even if you don’t attend any meetings or read our updates, your membership will make a difference. A large membership will add to our clout as an advocate for faculty and membership dues will help us continue to undertake efforts to gather data and disseminate it to keep our faculty better informed about issues of the academy both on our campus and across the country.

An Op-Ed, Published in the Greensboro News and Record on 03 03 2023:

If the UNCG administration wants to restore the confidence and trust of the faculty, the first step will be to refrain from all future cuts until faculty and staff have agreed on a process through which to chart a vision for the future of the university. Greater budget transparency is desperately needed, and the administration should cooperate with independent audits paid for by the UNCG chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP).

You can link to the complete Op-Ed.

  • Continuing cuts, and what YOU can do to help!
       As most of you know, cuts have been made—and are being made—to the funding for our graduate programs. These funding cuts go against the UNCG AAUP’s principle of no cuts without a) a plan and b) faculty input.
       The standard that administrators are using to make these funding cuts (any “non-terminal degree program”) is arbitrary. Faculty did not participate in determining this standard or in determining the process by which programs are being eliminated. 
       The result is that many of our graduate programs that serve students of color, first-gen students, immigrants, low-income, and other underrepresented people in academia will no longer be able to attract these students. These programs are being eliminated without an opportunity for robust debate and deliberation across the campus. 
       If you care about this decision—or about any of the other decisions that have been made and will continue to be made without a plan and without our input—we need you to be involved. 
       

 

  • Major themes from our February 2022 survey of faculty climate